On 16 September 1595, Henry Piers from Tristernagh, County Westmeath, passed a building called Castle Ougent on the road between Bologna and Florence. By his own account, the sound of this old castle's name put him in mind of the Nugents of Westmeath, and in particular of Christopher, the fourteenth baron of Delvin. Piers's family had only settled in Ireland as part of wave of new arrivals known as the “New English” within the past fifty years. The bilingual Nugents, known to historians as “Old English” had been there for hundreds of years. Piers, fostered as a boy to the Gaelic Irish O'Farrell family was, by both birth and marriage, Protestant. The Nugents and the O'Farrells were Catholic.

We know this from “A Discourse of HP His Travelles Written by Himself” (Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson, MS D. 83), now edited by Brian Mac Cuarta SJ as Henry Piers's Continental Travels, 1595–1598, both travelogue and conversion account. During his two-year study trip away from home and from his wife, Piers remained unshaken in his religious purpose but was buffeted and bounced about by the peculiarities of being the Irish-born son of English parents whose native soil was furrowed with religious division and political instability. He was, as he discovered in the English College at Rome, considered Irish by the English-born. Simultaneously, supporters of the Ulster Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell discounted his birthplace in favor of his ethnicity, denouncing him to the Inquisition as a potential English spy. Continental Catholics, whether in Rome or Seville, were inclined to view anyone from the realms ruled over by Elizabeth I as naturaliter Protestant. Like many travelers and students abroad, Henry Piers came to realize that the most precious document he possessed was his passport—except that in this instance, that passport was a document from the Roman Inquisition testifying to his being a Catholic of good standing. Those papers got him out of multiple and recurring scrapes.

Piers spent two years studying as a “convictor” or lay student, at the English College at Rome, itself an institution unsettled by recent squabbles between its English and Welsh students and between those who supported and disfavored Jesuit control of this key exile institution. He spent a further period reading philosophy in the English College, recently founded by Robert Persons SJ, at Seville. A layman, but attired according to the regulations as a clerical student, Piers sought to supplement his reconciliation to the Catholic Church with a scholastic underpinning of the same nature as those seminary priests of English origin whom he had encountered at home. His charming description of Clement VIII's “unmatchable” library as an “abondance of the only beste books in the worlde” (88) is the direct and familiar voice of the exhilarated student whose horizons have been stretched by means of a spell of study abroad. Like many contemporary converts, Henry Piers borders on the obsessive in his need to smack down Protestant plurality of voice and supposed novelty of opinion with litanies of Catholic unity and antiquity. Even Saint Patrick, Ireland's patron, serves Piers's idée fixe in his two cameo appearances here. First, he is name-checked with Dennis of France and Augustine of Canterbury as one whose conversion of a country rested on a papal mandate. Second, Piers is careful to prop up Patrick's romanitas and membership of a body of clerks regular by reminding his reader in his gazetteer of Roman churches that “The churche of Or Ladie of Peace [Santa Maria della Pace] perteinthe to the Cannon Regulars, here Saint Pathricke lived while he dwelled in Rome, and was one of that order. His feast is there yearly celebrated” (110).

Patrick's supposed Roman residence, the sojourn of someone of British ancestry whose youthful experience in Ireland had formed him, had more than symbolical significance for Piers. It accorded with his own experience of the international networks of the Catholic Church and the European endeavors of those who hailed from Ireland. All of Henry Piers's movements, from Ireland to the European mainland and home again were facilitated by clerical and mercantile links. These sustained the convert-student, and he, in turn, participated in them. So while his definitive decision for the Roman communion was probably sparked by his meetings with English recusant clergy in the house of his brother-in-law Thomas Jans at Dublin, the means, money, and mode of transport for his return to Ireland in 1598 were loaned to him by the Drogheda merchant Sebastian Fleming. In Seville, he helped and mixed with people from the merchant port of Waterford. In Rome, he was the beneficiary of the fact that his old acquaintance, Father Richard Haddock SJ, dropped into the house of one Dr. Fagan, also from Waterford, just after Piers had arrived the city.

Piers, like everyone else living in Ireland in the last decade of Elizabeth I's reign, was intimately affected by the unsettlements of warfare. Close to the end of this narrative, he has this to say: “I heard from Irelande of the deathe of divers of my friends and of the burning, wastinge and praying of my land” (209). He turned for home soon afterward. Indeed, this narrative, so expertly and sensitively edited by Mac Cuarta was only composed about 1605–1607, after the dark churn of the Nine Years War had passed. A beautifully produced addition to the long-running Camden Series of the Royal Historical Society, this volume has tons of material to engage the reader—Henry Piers is an engaging companion. His voice also restores the dilemmas, subtleties, and gradations of religious choice in early modern Ireland. Mac Cuarta's excellent work here, as with his many other publications, has been vital in moving discussion of religion in early modern Ireland away from the charred old ground of incantations of record destructions to an enhanced archival awareness.